Management and Diversity in the Open Source Community with Sara Chipps

The Untold Stories of Open Source

As Sara Chipps delved deeper into the world of open source and moved up into senior engineering and management roles, there was a specific skill she learned about how to work with and manage engineers.

"This is something you never get taught in school. This is something we don't stress to junior developers. This is something that senior developers learn late in their careers, is that the ability to influence the opinions of others without conflict is a superpower.

"By conflict, I don't mean not disagreeing. I'm more mean in this case, conflict of like a, a public fight or, or people getting angry or upset, like to be able to coach people through what you think is an incorrect opinion to a place where you're in agreement. It's hard, it's sometimes you're impossible, but it's an incredible skill to have.

"I love of bureaucracy and open source because that's a place that I've learned that I can be effective.

"My responsibility is identifying when people have a limiting mindset of you know, things should be this way and helping them to see the possibilities. What I've learned is that it takes time. Sometimes you have to say the same things 50 times in a row. Sometimes it doesn't work, but growing that muscle of having a message, staying on that message, learning who to identify as allies and to talk through things, that has been a really cool learning as part of my work here."

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Sara Chipps, Engineering Manager, Flagship Infrastructure, LinkedIn
• JewelBots, Craft Kits for Budding Inventors
• Girl Develop It, women and non-binary adults learn software development skills
• Girls Who Code, the world's largest pipeline of female engineers
• Robin Ginn, Executive Director at OpenJS Foundation
• OpenJS Foundation, driving broad adoption and ongoing development of key JavaScript solutions and technologies